I don’t know how to express or articulate my thoughts and my vocabulary and grammar gets messed up the more I write so I will just write simply.
What I’m trying to say is that every day or hour or minute or everytime you think, you feels like your original selves is dying. I know that we are constantly growing but i just can’t stop thinking that whenever we grow or learning new things or start to think differently, our past selves is dead. I think back to my past selves in middle school, highschool and from 2022 and think, aren’t they dead? No matter what i do or think or whatever happens to me, i can’t bring back the personalities or "me"s from the past. They remain dead and continue to being dead. Unless they are exist in another timeline or universe.
What exactly is identity, consciousness or the self which is me? I don’t know nor understand but this idea just stuck in my mind and occasionally appears when I’m bored, stressed or relaxed.
Here’s where having a conversation about this may be fruitless. You’re saying you feel dead, and you’re saying the only one who can define that is you. The caterpillar/butterfly comparison is objectively apt, because just like a butterfly cannot exist without having been a caterpillar, you as your current self could not have existed without having first been you in middle school, because you are literally the same organism as that middle schooler. However, you’re saying you feel dead, which no one outside of you has any real control of or input over, and if you’re stuck on that, it might be something you should discuss with a psychologist